P.S.A: GoCardless Changes (May Effect Fees)

[Pjj]

You’re flogging a dead horse pal. I’ve worked it out and for me I could take me and the misses on a luxury break every year for what it would cost for go cardless to collect my charges of which I get for free via bacs. I know which I would rather do?

Totally agree ?

 

[Part Timer]

You’re flogging a dead horse pal. I’ve worked it out and for me I could take me and the misses on a luxury break every year for what it would cost for go cardless to collect my charges of which I get for free via bacs. I know which I would rather do?

To be fair this is all relative on how you cost things, and I don't use any pay per use software except Quickbooks and that's only because of the Digital threat.
Using the likes of Gocardless might cost someone £40 - £500 a month but might save 1 - 20 hours a week. Personally I would value my time at £30 an hour, if going down a software route was cheaper than £30 an hour I'd do it.

 

[Iron Giant]

Must say I disagree. Their entire business is to help others collect money, that’s the point. That’s like saying window cleaners ‘do it to make money, not to clean windows’. They’re not mutually exclusive, one requires the other.

I highly doubt GoCardless will move to only offering services to large companies. Direct Debts have been a thing for a very long time and until recently only offered by large companies. It’s probably a saturated market. Hence companies are offering it to smaller and smaller businesses to expand their reach.

Finally, ‘Getting too expensive’ the price hasn’t went up for years. Yes if you go for a higher tier plan it’s more but this entire thread was to help folk not do that. I collected over £1,000 last month with GoCardless. Just got the invoice from them today. £23.14. How in anyway is that ‘too expensive’?

Some will get it others won't, those that are earning £70+ an hour but claim bacs is free are missing the point if they spend 1hour per month and most likely they are, chasing debt and marking of debts then they are down £70.00

I click two buttons within CP and in 5 working days the money is in by bank takes me 10 seconds.

Time is money and whilst like Scrooge your hunkered over your accounts trawling through 100's of jobs I'm doing just what I want to do which is no way work related

 

[Chris34]

Some will get it others won't, those that are earning £70+ an hour but claim bacs is free are missing the point if they spend 1hour per month and most likely they are, chasing debt and marking of debts then they are down £70.00

I click two buttons within CP and in 5 working days the money is in by bank takes me 10 seconds.

Time is money and whilst like Scrooge your hunkered over your accounts trawling through 100's of jobs I'm doing just what I want to do which is no way work related

Think the saying is saving pennies while the pounds pass you by.

It's all well and good saving money where you can, but if it's at a cost to your non working time then you have to work out what's worth saving and what's not.

I remember a discussion on the radio about an interview, I think it was with Bill Gates but could have been someone else. They basically said that the guy was earning something ridiculous like £100 per second, they said if you were walking along the pavement and saw a £10 note on the floor, would you stop to pick it up given that your time is worth a lot more? I think he said that he would and I cannot remember the reason why but I thought it was a good question.

For me if saving say £25 per month is going to cost me 3 hours of my time then it's not worth it. I'd rather have the time. Even if the time was only 30 minutes I still don't think it's worth it, the constant checking to see who's paid and then the text messages from those telling you they have paid and the messages having to be sent out to those who haven't.... it's just a pita in comparison to just being in control.

For me GC is very reliable. The only problems with payments are from cash payers and bank transfers. This year I've had zero problems with GC, and from memory last year I had zero problems, that's not a single problem of non payment. Bank transfers and cash payers I've all had paid... but I've had delays, double up payments, lots of texts to and fro, apologies and me having to tell them 'don't worry about it...' GC I don't have any of that.

 

[Cleanco]

I don’t see any time saving at all. It takes the same amount of time to click a mouse wether it be to collect a payment go card less or mark off a bacs payment. The only difference I see is that go card less clicks cost £££s. On the face of it may not seem like much but it soon mounts up to a sizeable chunk and those chunks are only gonna get bigger.

 

[Iron Giant]

I don’t see any time saving at all. It takes the same amount of time to click a mouse wether it be to collect a payment go card less or mark off a bacs payment. The only difference I see is that go card less clicks cost £££s. On the face of it may not seem like much but it soon mounts up to a sizeable chunk and those chunks are only gonna get bigger.

You don't understand how the integration of an app like Cleaner Planner and GC works it's not clicking on 25 jobs done in a day individually, I mark my jobs done submit my worksheet within CP then go to the debts page and click start GC it then makes those 25 requests in one go when the monies are paid out in a 5 working days those debts are marked as paid automatically without me needing to mark those jobs off individually myself

In your case, you'll need to log in to your banking app trawl through transactions and then mark off each job that has paid and have to keep on checking every 1-2 days going through the same process multiple times and probably sending out text reminders for non-payment.

 

[Master Jedi Alejandro]

You don't understand how the integration of an app like Cleaner Planner and GC works it's not clicking on 25 jobs done in a day individually, I mark my jobs done submit my worksheet within CP then go to the debts page and click start GC it then makes those 25 requests in one go when the monies are paid out in a 5 working days those debts are marked as paid automatically without me needing to mark those jobs off individually myself

In your case, you'll need to log in to your banking app trawl through transactions and then mark off each job that has paid and have to keep on checking every 1-2 days going through the same process multiple times and probably sending out text reminders for non-payment.

I’ll add with Squeegee it’s even easier.
As soon as I mark a job as ‘done’ while working, it automatically sends the request to GoCardless to process the transaction. Where as with bank transfer I need to do as follow at the end of each day (which I add is quicker than is use to be):

1. Sync bank payments with Squeegee
2. Assign payments to each respective customer
3. Message the customers who owe me for that day
4. A week later, repeat 1 & 2 before reminding those who haven’t yet paid

I don’t see any time saving at all. It takes the same amount of time to click a mouse wether it be to collect a payment go card less or mark off a bacs payment. The only difference I see is that go card less clicks cost £££s. On the face of it may not seem like much but it soon mounts up to a sizeable chunk and those chunks are only gonna get bigger.

It costs more like £.p than £££. And you just bake the cost into your price. The chunks getting bigger? Yeah probably but then do you not put your prices up? Like I posted before, cost me £23 to collect just under £1.1k last month. How in any way is that ‘£££’? I would have spent longer than £23 worth of my time chasing payments, I can tell you that for sure. And that £23 was baked into the price I quote the customer. £20 job? I quote £20.50. £40? £40.75.

 

[Iron Giant]

I’ll add with Squeegee it’s even easier.
As soon as I mark a job as ‘done’ while working, it automatically sends the request to GoCardless to process the transaction. Where as with bank transfer I need to do as follow at the end of each day (which I add is quicker than is use to be):

1. Sync bank payments with Squeegee
2. Assign payments to each respective customer
3. Message the customers who owe me for that day
4. A week later, repeat 1 & 2 before reminding those who haven’t yet paid

I'm still on the fence with Squeegee, I do need to do more research in terms of the switchover with GC customers as I have over 350 paying via GC I just don't want anything to go Pete Tong this apprehension is due to previous issues with Squeegee, I just need to take a leap of faith

 

[ched999uk]

I'm still on the fence with Squeegee, I do need to do more research in terms of the switchover with GC customers as I have over 350 paying via GC I just don't want anything to go Pete Tong this apprehension is due to previous issues with Squeegee, I just need to take a leap of faith

Have a chat to them as they may well be able to explain the fixes they now have in place to stop your previous issue happening. They always seem very responsive and helpful any time I have had a problem - each time it was user error ? ?

 

[Iron Giant]

Have a chat to them as they may well be able to explain the fixes they now have in place to stop your previous issue happening. They always seem very responsive and helpful any time I have had a problem - each time it was user error ? ?

I will do mate, a tad laziness on my part recently as had lots going on.

 

[Cleanco]

I’ll add with Squeegee it’s even easier.
As soon as I mark a job as ‘done’ while working, it automatically sends the request to GoCardless to process the transaction. Where as with bank transfer I need to do as follow at the end of each day (which I add is quicker than is use to be):

1. Sync bank payments with Squeegee
2. Assign payments to each respective customer
3. Message the customers who owe me for that day
4. A week later, repeat 1 & 2 before reminding those who haven’t yet paid


It costs more like £.p than £££. And you just bake the cost into your price. The chunks getting bigger? Yeah probably but then do you not put your prices up? Like I posted before, cost me £23 to collect just under £1.1k last month. How in any way is that ‘£££’? I would have spent longer than £23 worth of my time chasing payments, I can tell you that for sure. And that £23 was baked into the price I quote the customer. £20 job? I quote £20.50. £40? £40.75.

I get that but when I worked out the cost for my circumstance even on the cheapest plan at 1% + 20p per transaction it would cost me well over a grand a year in fees and then there’s all the admin time needed to get all my customers signed up which if you didn’t have them all on gc it would kinda be defeating the object.